I upload mostly birds and occasional specimens of other wildlife, but also have accumulated a “stash” of feral cats an dogs. I recently decided to “sprinkle them in” with obscured locations.
To the best of my knowledge, almost every one of them is feral in a sense that they are born outside and they live outside all the time, but also in most cases the people in neighborhoods they live in tend to feed them (including kittens).
I noticed that INaturalist tags a significant fraction of them as “not wild” by default. Should I overrule that statement? Are they even a meaningful contribution here?
Species that are commonly uploaded as captive in an area will get an automatically-applied captive tag on upload, just to reduce the number of random pets and garden plants appearing in the wrong category. You should feel free to overrule it!
Absolutely - feral animal populations can have huge impacts on local wildlife, and are very important to document!
(I will add, if you don’t already do so, it’s helpful to put a comment in the observation description just noting that the animal is feral so passing identifiers are less likely to assume it’s a pet and mark it as captive.)
Feral cats have enemies, people who want to eliminate them. Not here to debate the ethics of that, but I am aware of people who shoot feral cats dead. I’m also aware of some approaches that capture, neuter, and release stray cats. In any case, people should be aware that data on feral cats posted publicly on iNat or elsewhere could result in actions that harm the animals.
Thanks for the response!
I’ve uploaded those pictures, but for the location, just marked the city they’re located in and obscured even that. I’m also uploading them out of sync with other observations from the same days. Obscure+delay+ground-covered should hopefully prevent anyone from obtaining the exact location, while also hopefully contributing to the general statistics INat is after :D